OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER default value incompatible with @opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base

[legendecas]

Discussed in https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js/discussions/3415

^{Originally posted by fischerman November 16, 2022} What's the meaning of this log message?

Exporter "otlp" requested through environment variable is unavailable.

Why am I seeing it? I'm providing the exporter in code (not via env variables). OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER is undefined.

const exporter = new OTLPTraceExporter()
const sdk = new NodeSDK({
        resource: new Resource({
            [SemanticResourceAttributes.SERVICE_NAME]: '...',
        }),
        traceExporter: exporter,
        sampler: new AlwaysOnSampler(),
        instrumentations: [getNodeAutoInstrumentations({
            '@opentelemetry/instrumentation-graphql': {
                depth: 1000,
            }
        })]
    });

$ npm ls | grep @opentelemetry
├── @opentelemetry/[email protected]
├── @opentelemetry/[email protected]
├── @opentelemetry/[email protected]
├── @opentelemetry/[email protected]
├── @opentelemetry/[email protected]
├── @opentelemetry/[email protected]

The problem

The default value for OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER is "otlp", but BasicTracerProvider doesn't register any exporters so this would lead to a diag.error log by default.

[Ankcorn]

Hey, I am running into this bug and I think it's causing my traces to not be exported.

This line https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js/blob/ef6fcdcd1a7e5234758e3bcc9ff6c29db5ff4d23/packages/opentelemetry-sdk-trace-base/src/BasicTracerProvider.ts#L89 is being run because the _buildExporterFromEnv method is returning undefined.

Is there a work around? I am following this https://opentelemetry.io/docs/instrumentation/js/serverless/ guide to try and instrument one of my lambda functions

edit: Missed disableAwsContextPropagation: true 👀 - now I can see some logs but still nothing coming through to honeycome.

Edit: data is coming through, had a honeycomb related issue. Don't think this error is causing me any issues

[Smarker]

I had code just like the author's but I had also exported OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER: "otlp". Once I removed that export, it worked fine (due to #3492 fix)

[Smarker]

Try that, it should work, then I think we can close this issue.